This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: The Los Angeles Times
Jul 10, 2006
The Smithsonian Institution, our national museum and also a scientific research complex, is at a crisis point. Many of its 20 venues, such as the National Museum of Natural History and the National Air and Space Museum, need tens of millions of dollars in work. Desperate for funds, the Smithsonian has made arguably improper arrangements with big business, and it has accepted funding from corporations with an all-too-obvious interest in what goes on view in the institution's museums. But the real
Source: Haaretz
Jul 9, 2006
Israeli officials have decided to refuse all contact with Poland's new education minister because he leads a right-wing party they consider anti-Semitic, a policy that could hinder cooperation in the area of Holocaust education, officials said Sunday.Jerusalem is stopping short of a formal boycott of relations with Roman Giertych, but has decided instead to shun any dealings with him, said Tali Samesh, a senior official in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.
&quo
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 9, 2006
He is one of the nation’s most famous heroes, a swashbuckling outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. However, Rob Roy MacGregor — widely regarded as Scotland’s Robin Hood — has been labelled a common criminal by the national tourism agency. VisitScotland has angered historians and descendants of the freedom-fighter by describing him as a “notorious outlaw”.
Inviting foreign tourists to visit the West Highlands and Islands, Stirling and the Trossach
Source: CNN
Jul 9, 2006
Liverpool officials said Saturday they would modify a proposal to rename streets linked to the slave trade when they realized the road made famous by the 1967 Beatles song was one of them.
The unassuming suburban street was named after James Penny, a wealthy 18th century slave ship owner. Liverpool, the Beatles' northern English hometown, was once a major hub for the slave trade.
"I don't think anyone would seriously consider renaming Penny Lane," said city co
Source: NYT
Jul 9, 2006
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, the British adventurer and diplomat, was as decisive in the creation of the modern Iraqi state as any single person.Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell — or Miss Bell, as the Iraqis still call her — is interred in the Anglican Church's cemetery in a raised tomb. It's dried up and crumbling in the Iraqi sun. The British delegations that used to pay homage stopped coming months ago because of the danger. A ring of jasmine trees and date
Source: NYT
Jul 9, 2006
ON June 11, 1957, the Atlas, America's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, took its inaugural flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
It lasted 24 seconds. The missile roared off the launching pad and soared to about 10,000 feet before its engines failed. Tumbling out of control, the rocket fell through its own trail of fire before the safety officer on the ground sent a radio signal that told the wayward rocket to blow itself up.
The rocket's designers, though dis
Source: AP News
Jul 9, 2006
Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.
Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members. The o
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Jul 9, 2006
Kathy Domzalski remembers waking to the screams of the survivor. Pat Waddington remembers how close she came to sharing the fate of the eight student nurses -- opting at only the last minute not to stay overnight with her friends in the neighboring town house.
The fear ran through all of Chicago.
Exactly 40 years ago this week, Richard Franklin Speck broke into a two-story town house in a quiet middle-class neighborhood on the Southeast Side and made nightmares come t
Source: Elliot Jaspin, Cox News Service
Jul 9, 2006
It is America's family secret.
Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that remain almost exclusively white, according to the most recent census data.
The expulsions often were violent
Source: The Telegraph (UK)
Jul 8, 2006
The Pope has provoked controversy with plans to beatify 168 Catholic martyrs of the Spanish civil war.Historians believe that about 10,000 priests, brothers, nuns and laity were killed during the civil war from 1936-39, as Leftists fighting to defend Spain's secular republic tried to wipe out what they saw as Catholic resistance.
Beatification, a step towards sainthood, will help preserve the memory of those victims. But as Spain wrestles with conflicting versio
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Jul 8, 2006
Long before he died Friday night at the age of 93, Frank Zeidler had become a legendary Milwaukeean.The man who was mayor from 1948 to 1960 was an intellectual who loved serious issues and debate, a human encyclopedia of Milwaukee history, a meticulous recorder of everything he did or was involved in.
During his three terms at City Hall, Milwaukee nearly doubled in size and peaked in population. More than three decades later, Zeidler, a nearly lifelo
Source: http://froginawell.net/japan/carnival
Jul 8, 2006
The Fifth Asian History Blog Carnival has been posted at World History Blog, hosted by Miland Brown. AHC is a roundup of blogging about Asian history over the last two months: future editions will be monthly.
If you have blog posts to nominate, go here. If you would like to volunteer to host a
Source: NYT
Jul 8, 2006
New Yorkers, it has been said, like to complain.
Finally, there's proof.
It comes from the bowels of the municipal archives on Chambers Street, where thousands of complaints to the mayor have been unearthed from more than 30,000 boxes of official correspondence going back to the 1700's.
The parade of squeaky wheels includes a merchant requesting money to make up for income lost in a smallpox scare, a father angry that his 12-year-old son was allowed into a
Source: The Financial Times
Jul 8, 2006
Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford University in California and the University of Texas, is a man seized with a big idea, which he believes is large enough to be of global importance. He thinks that this idea - which goes by the name of deliberative democracy - addresses one of the large public anxieties of our times: the rapidly eroding popular support for the main variants of democratic politics, evidenced by a decline in voting, in party membership, activism and loyalty, in interest i
Source: West Yorkshire Police
Jul 8, 2006
A 300-year-old book that appears to be bound in human skin has been found in northern England, police said Saturday.The macabre discovery was made on a central street in Leeds, and officers said the ledger may have been dumped following a burglary.Detectives were trying to trace its rightful owner and believe it may have been taken from a dwelling in the area.
Much of the text is in French, and it was not uncommon around the time of the French Revolution f
Source: BBC
Jul 7, 2006
A print of the only photograph of Mozart's widow, Constanze Weber, has been found in Germany.
The photograph was taken in 1840 in the Bavarian town of Altoetting when she was 78. She died two years later. The local authorities say detailed examination has proved the authenticity of the image, which is a copy of the original daguerreotype.
HNN EDITOR'S NOTE: This story appears on the BBC website. But some on the Internet claim the photo is a fake.
Source: cronaca.com
Jul 7, 2006
Yellow-green glass carved into a beetle-shaped ornament and found on a necklace worn by the ancient King Tutankhamen was created by a meteorite fireball, according to new research. . . The geologists determined the scarab was made out of natural desert glass for the king, who reigned from 1333 to 1323 B.C.
Such glass is only found in the Great Sand Sea of the eastern Sahara desert. With a silica content of 98 percent, it is the purest known glass in the world.
Source: ansa.it
Jul 7, 2006
Roman Italy's third-biggest city (ANSA) - Aquileia, July 3 - Italian archaeologists are working hard to unearth more of the largest Roman city ever uncovered, a colony that served as a bulwark against barbarian invasions before being destroyed by Attila the Hun .
Aquileia in today's far north east, once the third-biggest city in Roman Italy, had been largely wiped off the map by foreign attacks and centuries of stone looting. But some of its ancient splendour remained in traces of i
Source: NYT
Jul 7, 2006
One hundred years ago this month, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer who had spent five years on Devil's Island for high treason and an additional seven years trying to clear his name, was absolved by France's Supreme Court. A few days later he was reinstated in the army, promoted to squadron chief, or major, and given the Légion d'Honneur.
The Dreyfus Affair, which deeply divided France and called forth a vicious wave of anti-Semitism, was finally over. Or was it?
Source: Secrecy News, the newsletter written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jul 7, 2006
The Department of Energy has released a redacted version of its October 2005 Historical Records Declassification Guide, a document used by classification reviewers to determine which information may be publicly released under the declassification provisions of executive order 12958.There are 15 categories of DOE national security information that are exempt from automatic declassification, the Guide explains, including information on naval nuclear propulsion, chemical
